and do its best. So in the New India, in the time since the heat wave, there was a complete revamping of priorities, and if at all possible the introduction of India-based solutions to the problems afflicting us. Here Sikkim and Kerala are in their different ways great exemplars of what can be done by good governance and India-first values and practices. Of course the solutions to our ills can’t come entirely from within India’s borders, big though it is compared to many countries, both geographically and in terms of population. No matter how big, all countries now need the whole world to be behaving well. Still, India is big, and big enough to provide human, agricultural, and mineral resources for a great deal of rapid upgradation.

What has been of interest is to see if the advances pioneered in the states could be rapidly scaled to the whole country. Not just Kerala and Sikkim, of course, but also states like Bangalore, the so-called Silicon Valley of India, which has led the way in that regard by founding a great number of engineering colleges. Now Bangalore, the Garden City, third largest in India, is thriving as a global hub for IT, and innovations there in the creation of the so-called Internet of Land and Animals might well help the process of full modernization of the Indian countryside. And then of course there is Bollywood in Mumbai, and the enormous mineral resources all up and down the spine of the country. Even taking coal off the table, as we have, the sheer physical wealth of India is unsurpassed; and in a world powered by solar power, India is indeed blessed. More sunlight energy falls on India than on any other nation on Earth.

So the important thing now is to join up past and future together, and join up also all the diversity of people and landscapes that is India, into a single integrated project. The biggest democracy on Earth has huge problems still, and also huge potential for solutions. We need to learn our agriculture from Sikkim, governance from Kerala, IT from Bangalore, and so on and so forth; each state has its contribution; and we must then put them all together to work for everyone in our country. When we have done that, then we will provide an example for the world that it needs; and also, having solved the contemporary problems of life in a democratic fashion for one-seventh of all humanity, there are that many fewer people for the rest of the world to worry about.

53

I zing and I ping and I bring and I bling. Freed to self in the heart of the sun, I banged around in there for a million years before popping out the surface and zipping off. Then eight minutes to Earth. In the vacuum I move at the speed of light, indeed I define the speed of light by my dance.

Into Earth’s atmosphere, exhibiting aspects both wave and particle but not either, I am a four-space conceptualized as an hourglass shape in three-space, where time and space cross in the human mind. Hitting things again, slowing down, breaking off brothers and sisters trapped in things, all the same, all without mass, all spin one, and so bosons, not fermions; one three-hundred-sixty-degree turn and I’m back where I began in that regard, while for fermions it takes seven hundred and twenty degrees of turning to get back to its original position; fermions are strange!

I am not strange, I am simple. Banging into atoms and moving them as I too move, simple as Newton, bang bang bang, the atoms of the atmosphere move more than they would have without my kick in their pants. That’s heat. Until I kick into something that captures me and I stop moving on my own. That or I might bounce off something I hit and head back out into space, become the light in the eye of some lunatic observer, looking up at the big blue ball and seeing me bang something in their retina. A blue pixel of the utmost granular fineness, so much so that the wave I make is easier to detect, maybe even easier to imagine. The wave/particle duality is a real thing, and both at once is hard to think, hard to see. It doesn’t really work, four-space in your three-space mind, no. I am a mysterious thing, massless but powerful. There are more of us than there are of anything else. Well, perhaps that’s not true. We don’t know about dark matter, which should be called invisible matter, we don’t know them or what’s going on there. Presumably its individual constituent elements are something like me, but maybe not; no one knows. All that stuff flies around as if in a parallel universe slightly overlapping ours, maybe just waves, in any case gravity works on it for sure, because its very existence has been revealed to us by its gravitation effects. If we are similar to those dark-matterinos, it is in the way that light and dark are similar. Two parts of a whole, perhaps. I am visible, I embody light itself; dark matter is not actually dark, it is invisible, and we don’t know how or what it is. Our absent self, our shadow, our twin. Although there are a lot more of them than us, maybe. A mystery among all the other mysteries, we fly through each other like ghosts.

But me, me, me, me, banging Earth, bouncing back up into the eye of an observer on the moon, then off again, immortal, immutable, I bang bluely on and on and on, and in the process, passing by just this once in a cloud of my brothers and sisters, we hit Earth and light it up, and the gas wrapping the planet’s hydrosphere and lithosphere gets warmer from our touch. My brothers and sisters follow me and they continue that warming.

What am I? You must have guessed already.

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